Don't be afraid of Jeremy Corbyn. Be afraid of what comes after him

Jeremy Corbyn’s followers won’t be the only ones cheering on Saturday. The Corbynites will throng to Liverpool to see the man they simply call “Jeremy” returned as Labour leader again, celebrating their latest victory over their party’s parliamentary establishment and its idea of how politics is done.

Even as Mr Corbyn shambles his way to the stage to stand before the party he has brought to its lowest ebb in almost a century, other, more discreet celebrations will take place, many of them far from Merseyside.

If there is one lesson from the last 12 months of politics, it is that the established order is fragile more fragile than it has been in a generation and maybe more

In some of London, in the Home Counties, in the south-west and a few parts of the Midlands and the north and quite a lot of Scotland, Conservatives will quietly applaud the man they believe guarantees their party victory at the next general election, meaning the Tories govern until at least 2025.

Fifteen years in power would represent the sort of era-defining political dominance that Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, in their very different ways, achieved, demolishing and demoralising their opponents in a way that inevitably gave rise to hubristic thoughts of permanent victory.

Yet in politics as in life, nothing is permanent. Changes can be hard to see coming, and the biggest changes can be the hardest of all to spot, even as they are under way.

In 1992, John Major’s Conservatives won the general election with 14 million votes, more than any party has ever received in Britain. Labour, defeated for the fourth time, was in disarray. The obituaries of the centre-left were written, much as they are today.

If there is one lesson from the last 12 months of politics, in Britain, in Europe and the US, it is that the established order is fragile, more fragile than it has been in a generation and maybe more. Some of the iron laws of politics, economics and society in the industrialised west have proved to be surprisingly flexible. Britain couldn’t leave the EU, and now it is. Donald Trump couldn’t run for president, and now he is. Things have changed, and are continuing to change.

That sweep of change is not yet properly defined or understood, but whatever it is and whatever it means, Mr Corbyn and the new party he has built around himself are surely part of it. They will surely have some wider consequence for our politics.

This isn’t, to be clear, a prediction that Mr Corbyn will ever be prime minister. He won’t: all the personal failings and political vices to which his followers are so blind will always keep him out of power. Now 67, he’s had the same politics and persona for four decades and more; he’s not going to change or improve now.

Mr Trump didn’t come from nowhere, didn’t simply fall on the US political system like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky

Mr Trump can tell a similar story. Before a single vote has been cast, Mr Trump has changed American politics, and the world. He has given voice to the angry and bewildered and disenchanted, legitimising policies and language the political establishment had long deemed off-limits.

Whoever is in the White House next year will have to deal with Mr Trump’s ideas and supporters.

America, the motor of the global free-market economy and a nation created by immigrants of every colour and creed, will consume itself debating ways to close its markets and its borders to the world.

Look at Mr Corbyn’s noisy, messy collection of angry and impassioned believers, and remember this: Mr Trump didn’t come from nowhere, didn’t simply fall on the US political system like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky.

What if in years to come, Mr Corbyn were to give way to leader with Mr Farage’s common touch or Mr Trump’s near-unstoppable bombast?

He is a viable candidate for the presidency because others created the conditions for his takeover of the Republican Party he now uses as a platform. The Tea Party movement started as an ugly, angry rabble, derided by the political establishment for its rejection of consensus policies and its evidence-defying belief that electoral victory does not lie in the compromises of the political centre-ground but in the pure principle and raw emotion of the fringes.

Mr Trump is the spark that set US politics aflame, but others helped lay the dry tinder for the blaze.

And Mr Farage laid the fire that burned down our EU membership, a relationship that had been one of the pillars that held up British political convention.

Might the Corbyn movement be creating the conditions for another bonfire of political certainty? A real challenge to Britain’s status as a free market economy where the state tries to leave the private sector to get on with the wealth creation it does so well?

That movement is more interesting and significant than the man who, nominally, leads it.

In an age when people are more cynical than ever about politicians and parties, hundreds of thousands of people have been drawn to Mr Corbyn’s Labour: with more than 600,000 people eligible to vote in the leadership election, Labour can claim to be the biggest political party in Europe.

Even allowing for the fact that it has never been cheaper or easier to engage in politics (one click and you’re an activist), that cannot be ignored or dismissed.

Never mind the fact that technology-driven businesses give us access to a new universe of online information, entertainment and commerce. Just rage at their profits and tax arrangements.

And the feelings that drive so many people to support a man conventional wisdom says is unelectable could, properly directed, have far greater political impact than they do today.

What if those people had a leader with real charisma or even just basic competence? What if in years to come, Mr Corbyn were to give way to a leader with Mr Farage’s common touch or Mr Trump’s near-unstoppable bombast?

Whisper it, but some Tories know that they too must deal with the ideas that drive Mr Corbyn’s legions. When the Conservatives gather for their conference next week, Theresa May won’t toast Mr Corbyn in champagne and tell her party his party’s weakness means the Tories can now embark on a decade of tax cuts, privatisation and the completion of Lady Thatcher’s trade union reforms, a vision of Britain with the world’s freest market and smallest state.

If British workers get seats reserved on company boards, it’ll be a Conservative prime minister who announces the plan, but Mr Corbyn and his band will be able to claim at least partial authorship of the plan.

So Mrs May is not complacent, not blind to the possible meanings of the Corbyn movement. But has her party started to learn the right lessons yet? Is it enough to use policies to nod in the direction of the concerns the Corbynites embody?

Jeremy Corbyn will win no elections and hold no high office beyond the party he has remade in his own image. But the emotional crowd rallying behind him are raising questions

There are today around 150,000 card-carrying Conservative members, the majority of them retired. Respectable, responsible people, they are largely drawn from the hard-working, self-sufficient and self-made middle classes who make Britain the great country it is – though they would largely be too modest to say so.

Yet they are few and growing fewer, and frailer: old age depletes their ability to go out and knock on doors and deliver leaflets, to fight the ground war that still matters in politics, even in an age of online everything.

Jeremy Corbyn will win no elections and hold no high office beyond the party he has remade in his own image. But the emotional crowd rallying behind him are raising questions, questions about the way Britain’s politics and economics are conducted. The man himself is incapable of answering those questions convincingly or even competently, but the Conservatives might be wise to offer their own answers, because if the Corbynites ever produce a real leader of their own, Britain will go up in flames.